Dungeons 2 Emerging Into Daylight Next Year

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Dungeons wasn’t trying to be a new Dungeon Keeper, but everything from the kooky ‘comedy evil’ tone to the very dungeon made it seem that way. It really wasn’t much like the Bullfrog classic, though. As our Jim explained, Dungeons was closer to a tower defence game with management bits. Now that we all definitely really understand that and won’t raise our hopes too high, might Dungeons 2 find a better reception? Or will it, at least, be better?

The sequel was announced last week, and is due next year. A useless cinematic trailer follows.

Dungeons was really about building a big fairground for goodie-goodie heroes to stomp through, becoming excited by the things they find and they fight, until they’re so giddy your dungeon lord swoops in and murders them to suck out their fizzy souls. A tower defence-ish, Tycoon-y, action-RPG sort of a thing squished into a Dungeon Keeper costume.

“I’d almost rather Dungeons was pulled away from its pantomime-dark Dungeon Keeperiness and put into something more like a bright, 2D tower defence game that pushes its clever mechanics front and centre instead of subsuming them into this strange tribute,” Jim said. Developers Realmforge, unsurprisingly, don’t do anything like that with Dungeons 2.

They do, however, take the show overground to prance about in forests and fight unicorns. The announcement also boasts of “numerous references to various fantasy books, movies and TV shows,” which I always find a miserable ‘feature’ to get over-excited about.

8 Comments

The entire cinematic trailer is basically a reference to the Dungeon Keeper games: pick up imp, put imp to work, slap imp.

If they don’t want the same disappointed reaction from the community as when they released Dungeons, they should really consider either making a game that plays like Dungeon Keeper, or refraining from trying quite so desperately to look like a game that plays like Dungeon Keeper. I doubt that trick will work again.

On the other hand, it also serves as a clear demonstration of different player priorities between the two series.

An enormous surface army is surging towards the entrance to your dungeon. What do you do?

DK: Gather defenders and place them in strategic areas; stand by with spells.

Dungeons: Find an idle imp and set him digging out a distant wall. You want the invaders to get in so you can harvest their souls, and your creatures are fixed anyway. Might as well get some interior decorating done while you wait.

Yeah, sure – that’s a good interpretation. But in order for someone to make that interpretation, they’d have to be familiar with both franchises already. Getting an imp out of the way of an attack and giving it a quick slap could easily have happened in DK as well.

The trailer – including the funny-evil tone just really reeks of trying to cash in on Dungeon Keeper nostalgia (again!) and while it’s too soon to say for sure, I doubt the game will really be able to live up to the expectations they’re trying to create.

The first dungeon game did this also its false advertisement and just there to lie to people,if you truly believe that they werent cashing in on DK popularity and the want for a new DK game in the first one you’re either stupid or blind.

The fact that they never actually made it clear what the actual mechanic were and all they did was advertise it like it was a DK game with tons of reference and showing just what looked like DK prior to release just show you what Kalypso really is for a company and what kind of game they tend to throw out to player.

Not to mention the fact that the dungeon lord look totally riped off from Overlord game…and the fact that the game itself was extremely mediocre at best.

I liked dungeons, it was a nice lil 10$ game, much better than imprie which is unplayable. What I’d like to see is better AI,being able to use more pentagrams maybe buying a booster room you have reqs for that costs a ton of money, Being able to set rally points for rally points in order to move your monsters to choke point more easily. Would be nice if I could dig out my dungeon the way I want as well.

I found the original Dungeons to be obtuse, unclear and frankly boring. If there was a good game in there I completely failed to find it. It is nothing like the elegant designs of the Dungeon Keeper games and the comparisons seem only to mislead and confuse. I won’t be checking this new one out.

I’ve tried playing Dungeons and even outside of Dungeon Keeper’s shadow it just wasn’t that good.

Dungeons had an interesting game mechanic with the heroes but the graphics were bland, the camera was awkward and the humour…dear god the humour, its stereotypically German in its inability to be funny.